1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data storage system and an associated method, and more particularly, to a data format capable of reducing the amount of stored data, and an associated method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Development of technology requiring more and more data to be written into or read from a flash memory means that the capacity of flash memories needs to be increased. When a host is going to store a data byte into a flash memory, a control circuit of the flash memory will store the data byte with a fixed format, generally comprising at least four portions. A first portion is the data byte, the second portion is a logical block address (LBA) from the host, the third portion is a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code, and the fourth portion is an error checking and correcting code, wherein the LBA, the CRC code and the error checking and correcting code are not data from the host, but are still written into flash memories. When a large amount of data is to be stored into a flash memory, all these non-data portions may occupy a lot of storage space of the flash memory. Hence, how to effectively store a data byte into a flash memory or read the data byte from the flash memory is an issue to be solved in this field.